There are places in this world that never quite let you go, no matter how many years pass, no matter how far your life carries you away. For me, that place has always been Stamford, New York—the small town where I grew up, where this chapter of my story began sometime in 1987, long before I had the words to tell it. This weekend, I found myself back there again, pulling into the familiar driveway of the old house that still wears the years like a favorite denim jacket—weathered, but still holding on.

Every time I return, it feels less like stepping into a memory and more like colliding with a part of myself that never really left. It’s as if some essential fragment of who I was—who I still am—waited patiently inside those walls, tucked between the floorboards and the cracked paint, peeling in some spots, yet the memories themselves left untouched by time or distance. For the short time I’m here, that piece of me breathes again. It’s an unsettling comfort, a reminder that some places—and some versions of ourselves—are permanent fixtures, even when everything else shifts.

There’s a gravity to it that I can’t deny. A pull that tugs at the core of me in ways I don’t even try to fight anymore. I used to think I had outgrown this town, this house, these ghost-like rough draft versions of myself—but the older I get, the more I understand that roots are not chains. They are lifelines. And sometimes, we need to come home, if only to remember who we were before the world demanded so much of us.

I left this home for the first time when I was sixteen—not by choice, but by force. My late father, realizing I was a lesbian, decided that loving differently made me unworthy of staying. He kicked me out without hesitation, leaving me to navigate the world with a hand-me-down 1991 Honda station wagon with bald tires, a duffel bag filled with my clothes, and six hundred dollars to my name. It wasn’t enough, but it had to be. I had just started my first job then, fumbling my way into adulthood far sooner than I should have. Somewhere in the middle of that chaos—the long hours, the sleepless nights, the desperate attempts to outrun the fear—I also fell in love for the very first time. Her name was Allegra, and for a little while, she made the world feel less brutal, less cold. Loving her was my first act of rebellion, my first taste of freedom, and my first understanding that even when you lose everything, sometimes you gain something even more sacred—the courage to build a life that is entirely your own.

For years and years after that first exile, I roamed—stumbling through life like a ghost trying to remember what it meant to be real. I was lost more often than I was found, chasing down dead ends and half-built dreams, unsure of where I was going or if I would ever really get anywhere at all. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and most days, it felt like the world was perfectly content to watch me disappear.

I carved out a backup plan the only way I knew how: with ink, and with light. I wrote when the world tried to silence me. I photographed what I was too afraid to say out loud. I wrote myself into existence while everything around me—circumstances, expectations, even people—did their best to erase me. If I was going to survive, it would be on my terms. Word by word, image by image, I built a life the world couldn’t take from me. I survived by becoming the person I needed when I was young.

For all the ways life has stretched and reshaped me, there are certain people who have remained untouched by time—fixtures of my heart, as steady and certain as the stars, where being strong was never a choice—it was a sentence handed down without appeal. The universe gifted me one such person—the best friend I have ever had. She is the kind of friend who knew me before I built the walls, before the years taught me how heavy survival could become. In a world that demands masks and performances, she has always seen me without either, and loved me anyway.

Nearly thirty years ago, when we were young and untested, there were romantic feelings humming quietly between us—a soft, unspoken thing we never fully named. We were two girls standing at the threshold of adulthood, trying to make sense of ourselves in a world that had no intention of making it easy. We could have been something more back then, but the truth is, what we eventually became—soul-level friends—was something purer, something that outlasted even the sharpest pangs of young love.

Even now, all these years later, I carve out time to visit her whenever I return. It is not an obligation or a courtesy—it is a necessity, like breathing. She is one of the few people who remembers the versions of me that I sometimes forget—the brave little girl, the reckless teenager, the young woman who thought she had to burn down every bridge just to find herself. And she loves all of those versions without question.

There is a sacred kind of loyalty that only grows in the soil of shared history. Ours is a friendship that doesn’t require explanations, apologies, or constant tending. It simply exists—solid, irreplaceable, and stitched into the very fabric of my being. Every hug, every late-night conversation, every inside joke that still makes us laugh like teenagers—they are reminders that while much of the world moves on, some things— some people—are too important to be left behind.

This last trip, though steeped in familiar places and familiar faces, also cracked open something new. On April 20, a date that will now mean more to me than a casual nod to cannabis culture, I found myself at a party hosted by one of my best friend’s friends. A gathering of souls under the haze of smoke and laughter, tucked away in a house that felt instantly welcoming, like it had been waiting for me to walk through its door.

Walking into the party, I felt like I had been transported straight back to my freshman year of college in 1998—a time when house parties weren’t about impressing anyone, but about belonging to each other in the most imperfect, beautiful ways. Cannabis was everywhere back then, woven right alongside flannel shirts, acid-washed jeans, the scratchy echo of grunge music, and the unshakable belief that while the world was changing faster than we could catch our breath, we still had each other. Back then, we hadn’t yet been taught to judge people by their differences—we were far too busy being amused by them, celebrating the weirdness in each other like badges of honor.

The ’90s were chaotic and brutal, filled with heartbreaks that left permanent scars and struggles that nearly broke me, but they were also, without question, the best years of my life. There was a rawness to it all, a freedom in not needing to be anything other than exactly who we were. Stepping into that party was like stepping into a photograph from those years—a vivid reminder that somewhere beneath all the noise of adulthood, that girl still exists, laughing and unafraid.

It wasn’t my usual scene. I’m not one for crowds or small talk—the kind of social theater that feels more exhausting than exhilarating—but there was something different about last night. Maybe it was the weightlessness that only comes from being among people who don’t expect you to be anything but yourself. Maybe it was the way the stars looked impossibly close overhead. Or maybe—probably—it was her.

She was impossible to miss—not because she demanded attention, but because something about her energy made the room feel smaller, more intimate. She had been introduced to me by my best friend, earlier this month, and we connected instantly. It was the kind of effortless, electric connection that doesn’t happen often, and doesn’t need to be explained. Conversation flowed like we were picking up a dialogue we had started lifetimes ago. There was no awkwardness, no hesitation—just a quiet understanding that whatever was happening between us was real.

I hadn’t gone looking for anything. At this stage in my life, I’m not in the business of chasing ghosts, or trying to manufacture connections just to feel something. But sometimes life throws a match onto a pile of dry kindling you didn’t even realize you had been carrying around, and suddenly, there’s fire. Real, undeniable, impossible-to-ignore fire. We are taught to apologize for needing—so we learn to need in secret. I needed this experience.

Love, I have learned, has never cared much for the rules we try to impose on it. It arrives when it chooses, in the forms it chooses, and it rarely asks for permission. So it shouldn’t have surprised me, but somehow, it still did—that what sparked at that party wasn’t just fleeting chemistry or the soft glow of a passing connection. It was something deeper. Something that demanded to be acknowledged.

It’s safe to say, without hesitation or fanfare, that I have a new girlfriend now. An arrangement that might look complicated on paper; she is married, after all, and she has a small child, but in reality, it feels beautifully simple. Both of our spouses know, both are supportive, and both understand what it means to let the people you love find their own additional sources of happiness, even when those sources exist outside the boundaries of tradition.

There is no hiding, no shame, no betrayal. Only an honest, open-hearted acceptance of the messy, beautiful reality that sometimes, love doesn’t fit neatly into the lines and boxes that society draws, and prescribes for us. I never thought I would find myself in something so nontraditional, and yet, standing inside it, it feels more natural, and more true than so many of the neat, sterile boxes I was expected to occupy over the years.

She makes me laugh in ways I had forgotten I could. She listens like the world isn’t rushing by outside the door. She sees me and all the jagged, weather-beaten pieces of me, and she doesn’t flinch. There is an easiness between us that feels rare, like stumbling upon a song you somehow already know the words to, even though you’ve never heard it before.

Some trips are about reunion. Some are about discovery. But this one reminded me of something heavier, something I have spent years trying not to think about.

Someday, my mother will no longer be here. It’s a truth I have carried like a stone in my pocket—always present, always heavy, but rarely brought out into the light, as I often try my best to deny this fact. Walking through the house this time, feeling the way it still holds the shape of my childhood, of my mother’s life, of everything that built me. I carry the grief of who I might have been if I had been loved properly, and lately I haven’t been sure if I’m healing, or just learning to hide the hurt better.

If something happens to my mom, I will need to throw the most epic house party this place has ever seen. Not out of disrespect, not out of avoidance—but out of sheer love. A celebration of everything this house has witnessed, everything it has held, everything it has meant. This house deserves that. She deserves that. I deserve that. I need to create memories here before I am ready to truly say goodbye to the place that raised me, as some memories are less about remembering, and more about refusing to forget. I know now that you can be both grateful and grieving at the same time.

And after the party fades and the last car pulls away, I will need to keep this house — at least for a few years. Hold onto it the way one holds onto the last embers of a fire on a cold night. Perhaps I need to be reminded of how I became my own sanctuary when the world offered no shelter. I need to remind myself that there are still people here who care enough to call me back when I drift too far. Friends who show up without being asked, who go out of their way to include me, who save me a seat at the table without blinking. These are the people who knew the rough drafts of who I was, and love the final version just as much.

Stamford may be a small dot on a map to most, but to me, it’s one of the last places where I belong without needing to explain myself. Without needing to earn my space. In a world that often feels indifferent at best and hostile at worst, that is a rare, sacred thing. I owe it to myself to keep that tether intact—if only for a while longer. If only to honor the girl who still lives somewhere in those walls, waiting to be found every time I come home.

Coming back here always reminds me that home is not a place you can ever fully leave behind. You can pack your life into boxes, change your zip code, rewrite your story a hundred times, but some pieces of you are stitched so deeply into the soil, the wood, the very air, that no distance can sever the connection.

This trip was supposed to be just another weekend—a quick visit, a few familiar faces, a few memories dusted off and quietly put back where they belonged. But it became something far more. It became a reminder that life—a real, messy, unapologetic life never stops offering second chances to find myself. Whether it’s in the arms of an unexpected love, or in the crumbling corners of an old house that still knows your name, life keeps showing up, daring you to stay awake for it.

I needed this. I needed the late nights, the laughter-soaked conversations, the slow unraveling of old ghosts and new beginnings. I needed the sharp, sweet ache of remembering who I was, and the electric thrill of rediscovering who I somehow had the the courage, determination, and strength to become.

Most of all, I needed to be reminded that I still belong somewhere—that even after everything the world has taken, there are still places and people who choose me without hesitation. And maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe the pieces we leave behind aren’t losses. Maybe they’re sacred reminders that no matter how far we roam, we are never truly alone.

Sometimes, coming home isn’t about retracing old steps or trying to slip back into who you once were. It’s about finding the parts of yourself that you left behind—the ones still waiting quietly in the corners, still hoping to be seen, still aching to be loved. It’s about recognizing that the real work of living isn’t in surviving the world’s expectations, but in salvaging what the world tried to take from you. This messy, unfinished, wide-open reclamation is what it means to truly be alive.